Has hosting on science direct improved the visibility of Latin American scholarly journals? A preliminary analysis of data quality

Latin American regional journals have adopted measures to increase both their quality and visibility, among which figures the promotion of their inclusion in international databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. An increasing number have recently taken advantage of the support and hosting services offered by Elsevier on the Science Direct (SD) platform, with the expectation of achieving this goal. The present study takes a preliminary look at the tendencies in the coverage in these databases of a sample of open access Latin American journals hosted on SD in June 2016 and their metadata, to typify the most common errors which can affect the use of performance indicators in individual and institutional evaluations and the integration of authors into scholarly reputation systems. A significant level of these errors was found relating to such aspects as journal coverage, duplicate records, reference data and links to full text, in addition to conventions concerning author names and titles that adversely affect retrieval of articles and the correct assignation of author credit and of citations, suggesting that present strategies have yet to deliver the expected results.